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Last weekend afforded an opportunity to explore the Lembert Dome Hike in Yosemite National Park. Lembert Dome is the monolithic dome that dominates the eastern end of Tuolumne Meadows in Yosemite National Park. It's a justifiably popular ascent, particularly among day hikers in the area, with the summit offering magnificent views of Tuolumne Meadows to the west, the Cathedral Range to the south, and the Sierra crest to the east. The trail starts out a bit steep but the views...
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Dear Lazyweb, I'm interested getting an idea of what open source message queueing systems exist that are fast, stable, and have some good replication (think multi-colo) and fault tolerance built-in. The idea being, of course, that some processes want to send messages into a queue (of work to be done) and other processes will fetch those and do stuff with them. Ideally, I'm looking for a system that allows for different message priorities--meaning that I'd like to be able to...
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The InnoDB storage engine has done wonders for MySQL users that needed higher concurrency than MyISAM could provide for demanding web applications. And the automatic crash recovery is a real bonus too. But InnoDB's performance (in terms of concurrency, not really raw speed) comes at a cost: disk space. The technique for achieving this, multiversion concurrency control, can chew up a lot of space. In fact, that Wikipedia article says: The obvious drawback to this system is the cost of...
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Last week I had the opportunity to do a bit of protocol hacking and found myself stymied by what seemed like a race condition. As with most race conditions, it didn't happen often--anywhere from 1 in 300 to 1 in 5,000 runs. But it did happen and I couldn't really ignore it. So I did what I often do when faced with code that's doing seemingly odd things: insert lots of debugging (otherwise known as "print statements"). Since I...
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In Amazing Powers of Concentration, Brad Feld says something that resonated with me. I've never really understood the phrase "I'm thinking." It's too abstract for me. I like to think I think all the time. So "I'm thinking" doesn't feel like it applies to anything. For example, when "I'm running", it's pretty clear what I'm doing. "I'm thinking" - not so much so. That's so true. Thinking is an ongoing and difficult to see activity. In fact, I know...
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About a week and a half ago, I noticed that Barnes (one of our two older cats) was thinner than he used to be--so much so that I felt his bones when I gave him the sort of back scratching that he loves so much. Both he and his brother (Noble) are about 10 years old and have nearly always been on the heavy site. And, of course, don't get to a vet regularly because they utterly detest cat trips....
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Many people have asked (via IM, email, Twitter) how my new job is going, what craigslist is like, etc. So here are a few thoughts about my first two weeks in the new job. The Commute Despite what folks said in the comments of my little announcement, the commute really isn't that bad. Taking I-280 from Willow Glen (San Jose) up to near Golden Gate Park is about 55 minutes from pulling out of the garage to parking in San...
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We recently bought an electric griddle so that I could make more than one pancake at a time. After reading a few reviews, I confirmed that the 20 inch electric model from Presto was the way to go. While it's available on Amazon.com (and here), I bought locally and got the chance to put it to use last weekend when some of the family were visiting. I was surprised and impressed by how quickly and evenly it heated. But...
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News is out today that Chad Dickerson is leaving Yahoo! to become the CTO of Etsy in New York. That's fantasic news and I wish him the best of luck. Having made a similar decision myself, I know it's not easy. How time flies. I still remember interviewing Chad on the phone a few years back and talking about some experiences we had in common: using Perl to wrangle news and content feeds from varous partners and so on. It...
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Yesterday was my first day as an employee at craiglist. Several folks on Twitter asked how it was, so here are my thoughts. First off, it was a bit like a first day anywhere. I had several new people to meet, a bunch of paperwork to fill out for benefits and payroll stuff, and started to get an overview of how things work. Unlike jobs in larger organizations, I had the pleasure of un-boxing and setting up my chair,...
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In Will Mainstream Users Ever Learn About The Browser's Address Bar?, Marshall probes a bit into how people use the browser's search box vs. the address bar. A lot of people seem surprised to learn that tons of people every day are "searching" for ebay.com or aol.com or just "ebay" or "aol" even though they can type those things into their address bar and get exactly what they want. I think part of the problem is the myth perpetuated by...
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Ever since fuel prices have been on the rise, I've wondered why airlines don't price tickets based on weight rather than the current system where pricing is related to factors that few of us understand. I mean, really, if it costs more to fly a 300 pound person than a 180 pound person, why shouldn't the 300 pound person pay more? And by "300 pound person" I'm including the 200 pound person that brings 100 pounds of baggage along. That...
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One of the more ambitious projects in the works when I left Yahoo was BOSS, a more open Yahoo! Search for developers and publishers. I see that BOSS launched today and wanted to say congrats to my friends in the Yahoo! Developer Network and Yahoo! Search. Marshall Kirkpatrick said it well in his ReadWrite Web post today: It is clear, though, that BOSS falls well within the company's overall technical strategy of openness. When it comes to web standards, openness...
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This is a test document from google docs. I decided to try this procedure to see if it worked for my old MT blog install. Sure enough, it seems to. Kick ass. Sort of. You see, I'm not sure I really want to write my blog posts in Google Docs. But it's nice to know that I can do this if I want to. Anyone else tried this yet? Hmm, checking the source, it seems that there's some funky stuff...
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Yesterday night I made grilled tuna for the first time. And the consensus is that the results were mighty fine. So good, in fact, that paying restaurant prices for the fish was still worth it. (Yeah, tuna is a bit more pricy than I expected...) Here's what you need to make the marinade spread: 4 peeled garlic cloves 1 tablespoon coarse salt (sea salt) 1 tablespoon dried oregano leaves 1 tablespoon dried basil leaves 1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper...
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